The complete package of items I made for my friend’s wedding, including the invitation bundle, place card and lined envelope

I had the most delightful conversation with my friend Meghann this morning.  Meghann is getting married in December of this year, and she just received the package of wedding invitations the hubby and I made for her and her fiance.   I’m so happy and relieved that she likes the results of our efforts (the hubby mainly used his biceps to help me with lifting boxes of cardstock, and he’s a whiz with a glue stick).

If you’ll recall, I volunteered to make Meghann’s wedding invitations for her with my little Gocco machine, a Japanese printing machine.  For DIY’ers, the Gocco is better than a regular inkjet printer because you can print using light-colored or metallic inks on dark paper.  It’s also worse than an inkjet printer in a lot of ways, but mainly because each card must be hand printed.  In the case of these invites, where I used two colors, each card had to be handprinted twice.

Meghann’s wedding is going to be in the Deep South, so she wanted something that felt a little vintage and Southern.  I came up with these designs based on some invitations Meghann liked from the interwebs, and while I’m genuinely proud of having accomplished such a big project, I’m also genuinely relieved to be done.  The last step of the process was to ship all 500+ printed pieces to Meghann in California, which I did by packing each bundle of pieces in tissue paper, then wrapping the whole thing in a giant trash bag before sealing the box.  I had this horrible mental image that somehow between the flying and transporting from Malaysia to America, my box of beautiful handprinted invites would end up crushed, rained on or possibly worse.  I pictured the box arriving a soggy, wet, muddy mess, resulting in no wedding invitations for Meghann and me being reduced to a bowl of tears.

The good news is, the invitations arrived dry and in one piece, and now I can focus on my other projects, like when I made macaroni and cheese for 150 people last weekend or slow-roasted a pork shoulder for Family Dinner the next day.  Or you know, child-rearing, whenever this baby decides he’s ready to arrive …

For more information on what a Gocco is, click here.  For more on my other projects involving my little Gocco machine, click here.  For a beautiful example of a professional Gocco wedding invitation artist, click here.